Archive for April, 2009

Just So

Thursday, April 30th, 2009 | daily | No Comments

truckIt occured to me today that I might be a happier person if I didn’t expect everything to be just exactly, precisely so.  You’d have thought that working at a fraternity house would have cured me of this, but no, I’m infinitely worse now.  It was when I was meeting with the transportation manager today, telling him I would like my deliveries at 7AM every time consistently, and he asked if 6:58-7:02 would be okay, that I thought perhaps I should seek therapy.  Earlier, my delivery had indeed arrived at the magic hour and I had a new driver.  “They send me to the angry customers,” he said with a huge grin and this is what I love about the drivers; they’re so completely, refreshingly lacking in bullshit skills.

Poltergeist

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 | daily | No Comments

dsc00548“It wasn’t me!” Julien cried out from the dish room as we all heard a huge crash.  Broken bowls everywhere.  About ten of us were in the dining hall, including Badley, the President, and it was Badley who shouted back, “you’re by yourself in there.”  Meaning of course, who the hell else was it if not you?  I was sitting in the dining hall working on Thursday’s order and I found this so funny.  It’s the essential problem with a house full of guys…it’s never any one particular person’s fault…it’s someone else’s.  But when you are the ONLY person there when it happens…Still, Julien continued to swear that the bowls flew off the shelves of their own accord and reenacted it for me in this photo.  There are days like this when I reconsider my daily decision to quit.  Days when I find them really funny and they cut me some slack and it’s all just one big hilarious excuse for a job.

Tantrum

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 | daily | No Comments

dsc00345This isn’t Jake.  It’s Shane enjoying lunch in February.  I looked through my inventory of photos for one of freshman Jake, but I think I deleted the only one I had taken.  He was eating a banana in a way that made you think, “ooooh, I don’t want to be that banana.”  I wanted to post his photo because yesterday he made me laugh (and yesterday was no laughing matter) by coming into the kitchen and announcing “this stuff is GOOD!…this quiche stuff.”  I relayed this to my husband over dinner and it amused him, too, as we realized that these guys are too young to know about that whole stupid 80’s thing ”Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche.”  That was the only good part about yesterday, other than being alive.  When Kirk told me my truck was going to be late, only for the hundreth time, I went completely bonkers.  It was amazing how calm he was in the face of the rantings of a crazy woman.  “What do you want me to do?” he asked, and I screamed, “I want someone to get my goddamn sausages off that truck and bring them to me NOW so I can make these guys a goddamn lunch!”  I said this as I opened the door to a startled contractor who’d just arrived to work on the patio.  And then I hung  up on Kirk, pouted at the contractor and stormed back into the kitchen like a two year old.  So today I received an email from the Transportation Manager offering to meet with me to discuss “what has transpired with your deliveries” over these three years and to find a solution.  I said that Thursday would be good.  Noon.  “If I’m not dealing with a late delivery. ” I couldn’t help myself.

Dirty Linen

Sunday, April 26th, 2009 | daily | 3 Comments

chrisThis is Chris, my linen guy.  For someone that I see five minutes once a week, I know an amazing amount about his wife, his kids, his debt collectors.  In a former life, I was a paralegal and I spent some time interviewing jail inmates and volunteering at legal aid, listening to the stories of clients’ chaotic lives.  At legal aid, it was my job to summarize the whacked out existence of the clients for the lawyers who might take their cases.  Like cooking, it could be creative to distill an hour’s worth of desperate pleading into a catchy sentence:  Client A is being evicted from her shoe, which she shares with her 50 kids whom she’s accused of beating and starving.  Chris reminds me of those days, not that he’s a criminal or anything.   It’s just that the stories are so unlike my serene life.  ”Put that in your blog!” he says each Tuesday as he winds up his monologue.

Doppelganger

Friday, April 17th, 2009 | daily | 4 Comments

dsc00543There’s been a creepy phenomenon going on here for some time.  Newman and Dan swore to me that one of the guys–we’ll call him Chris–has been usurping Newman’s identity.  At first I thought they were imagining it, but then I started to notice it, too and it inexplicably got under my skin.  Chris would come into the kitchen and go through exactly the same moves, ask for exactly the same things as Newman had done 30 seconds earlier.  I wasn’t sure who was being driven more insane by this weirdness, me or the Doppelganger victim.  “He can’t be me!” Newman finally cried out, “because I’m me!”  So when I saw Dan yesterday morning with a scrape on his face–a scrape amazingly and suspiciously similar to one I’d seen the day before–it was my first question:  “Is this a Chris thing?”

Food Show Neurosis

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 | daily | 4 Comments

dsc00540This is me at the food show today talking about local, sustainable farming–a subject so serious for me I’m paying $700 to work on a farm this summer.  And you can see that Rod–a senior manager at US Foodservice–is just riveted.  To be fair, he had been there for hours before this and I would be wishing the customer would just shut the fuck up and let me go home, too, if it were me.  The customer just has to stay long enough to try the hot dog sliders (sure to be a big seller with the sororities) and indestructible raspberry mousse.  Even good food shows like this one are wretched.  Like a cocktail party without the liquor.  I went alone, but I noticed that some people brought a date, which probably helps with that junior high angst as you wait for your nametag feeling like you have a big tatoo on your forehead that says, “I’m uncomfortable as hell and please don’t make me taste your squirrel soup.”  And it’s no use trying to be my natural self at these things because that just gets me into trouble–like when I inadvertantly let on to the Post cereal guy that we use half the containers he gave us for Kellogg’s product.  Oops.  The worst part for me, though, is that some of these vendors have read the blog and so when they look longingly in the distance as Rod is doing here, I can’t tell if they’re avoiding national exposure or just searching for a much more important customer to bore themselves with.

Renaissance Men

Saturday, April 11th, 2009 | daily | No Comments

dsc00537“Have a boiled egg,” I suggested to Sal when he caught me heading out the door on Friday.  I had left them for the stragglers along with other items on the buffet table.  “No omelette?!” he cried.  I explained that I was going home, but Sal has a way of inducing more sympathy than the limbless man on 4th and Union.  “I’ll make you a deal,” he said brightly, “you make me an omelette and I’ll tell you about my night at the party.”  Somehow statements like “girls told me I’m hot” just didn’t seem like a fair trade, but the cheese was already melting into the eggs before I realized that Sal didn’t have nearly the exciting night that Jake had had, and that was a story I got to hear for free.  Newman was the artist for the party and he is clearly squandering his talents with his political science major.dsc005361  Rod from US Foodservice used to call Newman the cook’s pet, but it’s not true.  Perry was my pet.  He is simply one of my favorites because he does interesting things like gutting fish in Alaska and studying in Europe.  .  And then there’s  Brian, pictured above with Sal, who takes the Reniassance Man prize by being both an engineering major and an actor/poet.  I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn that he trains bees and speaks dog,too.

 

 

Child-Proofing

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 | daily | No Comments

dsc00533For those who might think I’m lucky to have the sort of job where I can talk to my customers like this, I would counter that I have a job where I occasionally need to talk to my customers like this.  And for the parents who read this blog, your son is not my perp, I’m pretty sure of that.  In fact, three of them came into the kitchen laughing to tell me that I was way too kind.  One even added his own comment to the sign, but I decided to leave it to my readers’ imaginations rather than capturing it on camera.  I know I should probably assume good intentions, but some of the detectives in the house pointed out clues that whoever did this had clear criminal intent.  A couple of years ago, the freezer was unplugged three times before I finally installed child-proofing deterrence.  Of course, I could discover that the guys’ adult advisor did this for completely logical reasons, at which point I will be suitably embarrassed.  And fired.

Food Folly

Monday, April 6th, 2009 | daily | 3 Comments

london-bookstoreI read online today that the economy is pushing the unemployed into cooking schools.  Like the former Wall Street trader who “loves Top Chef” and has 400 cookbooks and has decided to pursue a career “with soul” in the restaurant business.  Or the former legal secretary who’s going to raid her kid’s college fund for culinary school because her friends rave about her dinner parties.  This is sad stuff.  What these people don’t understand is that most food service jobs are horrible.  You’re not whipping up a souffle for Tom and Padma, you’re peeling 500 pounds of potatoes, or worse, supervising the miserable kitchen serfs who are peeling 500 pounds of potatoes, if they show up for work, which they often don’t, so then you’re doing it and asking yourself why exactly you paid outrageous tuition to do what any monkey could do.  I want to shout out to these people:  loving food is not a good reason to go into this business.  In fact, hating food is probably a huge advantage because most of the people hiring are not going to be paying you for your great ideas.  I actually read an ad that said so:  your creativity is not required here.  It’s not that all food jobs are soul-crushing endeavors; I’m taking a blissful summer job preparing exquisite food for highly cultured people on the Olympic Peninsula.  And I’ll be lucky if the pay covers my ferry rides.

Brain Lag

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 | daily | No Comments

img_0499“Did you know that goat meat is a staple in many countries around the world?”  Brian asked as I entered the dining hall.  I had glanced at the New York Times food section before leaving home, so I knew immediately what he was reading.  The guys peruse an eclectic mix of material, some of it so shocking I’ve brought it home to show my husband and then discretely disposed of it so that other condo residents wouldn’t guess the origin.   But this stopped me in my tracks–one of the guys reading the food section–and had me reaching for my camera.  This first week post Spring Break has been a tough adjustment for us all.  “I don’t have jet lag,” I told Kirk, “but I have brain lag.  I’m not here.  I just look like I’m here.”

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